Chapter 15 - Six Minutes to the Carlyle
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"Dante! Lock Donovan in the server vault and bring the helicopter to the roof pad!" Lucian barked into his radio as he and Elena sprinted toward the private express elevator, bypassing the forty-minute Midtown gridlock on Fifth Avenue below. "Call Marko at the Carlyle suite—tell him do NOT let anyone touch Professor Mercer’s morning infusion or let any delivery through the service elevator!"
Inside the ascending elevator cab climbing toward the helipad on the sixty-fifth floor, Lucian held the phone to his ear.
All that came back from Marko—the lead guard stationed outside the twenty-fourth-floor Carlyle suite—was static, followed by the shrill electronic three-tone chime of an intercepted cellular tower!
"They’ve got a stingray cell-jammer parked in a van outside the Carlyle on Madison Avenue," Lucian said grimly as the elevator doors burst open onto the windswept rooftop helipad, where the Bellini corporate AgustaWestland chopper was already spinning its rotors at full pitch. "They’re blocking wireless calls to the twenty-fourth floor so Marko doesn't know Donovan was burned!"
Lucian lifted Elena into the cabin, strapped her harness tight across her chest, and leaped into the co-pilot’s seat beside his veteran pilot, strapping on a flight headset.
"Put us down on the roof of the Carlyle Annex in ninety seconds, Leo!" Lucian ordered the pilot. "I don't care what the FAA says—fly straight up the Park line at full throttle!"
The twin-engine helicopter lurched upward into the crisp October sky, banking hard over the green canopy of Central Park at a hundred and forty knots.
In the back seat, Elena pressed her forehead against the cold plexiglass window, praying harder than she had ever prayed in her life. Her father was everything she had left in the world. For two years she had scrubbed coffee pots, graded papers until two in the morning, and swallowed her pride so he could live out his years in peace—and now, because she had opened her mouth in a mafia boardroom, killers were walking toward his door.
"Give me the Carlyle’s landline number for the front concierge desk," Elena said suddenly into her headset mic, remembering her own months of working building reception desks. "Stingray jammers only block cellular frequencies—they can't cut hardwired fiber-optic hotel trunk lines without tripping the NYPD precinct alarm across the street!"
Lucian’s eyes flashed with fierce pride as he immediately dialed the Carlyle’s hardwired lobby switchboard via the helicopter’s satellite relay.
"Carlyle Concierge, how may I direct—"
"This is Lucian Bellini, Suite 24-A," Lucian cut in with absolute authority. "Did a medical courier just go up the service elevator to the twenty-fourth floor?"
"Yes, Mr. Bellini, two men from the pharmacy lab and a respiratory tech went up with a stretcher cart about ninety seconds ago—they had a signed transfer order from Dr. Mercer’s neurologist saying he needed an emergency MRI at Mount Sinai!"
Elena’s heart stopped. "They aren't poisoning his vials—they’re kidnapping him right out of the apartment pretending to be an ambulance transfer team so your guards open the door for them!"
"Hit the fire alarm for the entire twenty-fourth floor right now!" Lucian roared into the phone to the terrified concierge. "Lock down the service freight elevators at the basement level—those men are armed kidnappers!"
Thirty seconds later, the helicopter’s skids slammed down onto the flat tar-and-gravel roof of the Carlyle Annex building, linked by an enclosed skybridge to the twenty-fifth floor of the residential tower.
Lucian kicked the cabin door open before the rotors even slowed down, jumping out with his suppressed 1911 in one hand and catching Elena as she leaped down beside him.
Together, they sprinted across the skybridge and burst through the emergency stairwell door down onto the twenty-fourth floor, where the deafening wail of the building’s fire klaxons and flashing white strobes filled the cream-paneled corridor.
Outside Suite 24-A, Lucian’s two guards—Marko and Tony—were lying unconscious on the carpet, hit from behind with stun batons the moment they had turned to inspect the fake medical transfer papers!
Inside the suite, Nurse Francesca was bound to a dining chair with medical tape over her mouth, her eyes wide with terror as she pointed frantically toward the open back service door leading to the freight elevator vestibule!
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"The freight elevator!" Elena cried, seeing the digital floor indicator above the brass doors stayed frozen at 24—because the concierge downstairs had cut the elevator power just as Lucian ordered!
Trapped by the dead elevator, the three men in blue medical scrubs had abandoned the wheeled stretcher in the vestibule—and were currently carrying frail sixty-eight-year-old Arthur Mercer down the concrete service stairs toward the basement alley exit on 76th Street!
